Inmates are staging riots over a new Government ban on smoking in prisons, which is seeing tobacco steadily phased out.
A ban on tobacco cigarettes is now being slowly introduced into prisons, with several jails already having banned them outright.
Others, meanwhile, are preparing to be completely smoke-free by September.

Academics and scholars must be mindful about using research done by only straight, white men, according to two scientists who argued that it oppresses diverse voices and bolsters the status of already privileged and established white male scholars.

Geographers Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne argued in a recent paper that doing so also perpetuates what they call “white heteromasculinism,” which they defined as a “system of oppression” that benefits only those who are “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.” (Cisgendered describes people whose gender identity matches their birth sex.)

Progressives progress. Like the Geico commercials say, it’s what they do. No matter how insane their ideology, they always find a way to progress still further into lunacy — even when no normal person would think it could be possible, as with the transgender agenda. Now they tell us that it is politically incorrect to assign genders to pets. From the feminist revolutionaries at Medusa Magazine:

July 16, 1900, His Master's Voice, the logo of the Victor Recording Company and later RCA Victor, was registered with the US Patent Office. The logo shows the dog, Nipper, looking into the horn of a gramophone. via thisdayinmusic.com

*****

July 16, 2014, Blues guitarist Johnny Winter died at the age of 70 in Zurich, just days after playing at the Lovely Days Festival in Austria. Winter, who was instantly recognisable by his long white hair, worked with some of the greatest bluesmen, producing several albums for his childhood hero Muddy Waters - with whom he won a number of Grammys. via thisdayinmusic.com

*****

July 16, 1981, US singer-songwriter Harry Chapin, who had success in the 70s with 'Taxi’, ‘W-O-L-D’ and a No. 1 ‘Cat’s In The Cradle’, was killed aged 38 suffering a cardiac arrest while driving on a New York expressway. His car was hit from behind by a tractor-trailer, causing the gas tank to explode. via thisdayinmusic.com

The researchers caution that it can be hard to estimate these aggregate results because, while automation may displace workers, directly lowering employment opportunities and wages, other industries might hire those laborers. Furthermore, there could be productivity gains that may wind up expanding employment opportunities in the very industries in which IRs are used.

The findings suggest that the impact of robots is distinct from, and only weakly correlated with, potentially confounding variables such as imports, offshoring, the decline of routine jobs (such as information processing), and other computer technology. The researchers also determined that their results, in areas that saw great increases in robot usage, were not due to a preexisting downward trend in employment or wages prior to 1990.

A spate of recent articles corroborate what I already suspected, that holding elected office is the neurological equivalent of getting kicked in the head by a donkey.

"Subjects under the influence of power," Dacher Keltner, a professor at University of California, Berkeley found, "acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people's point of view."